O Fallen Angel, by Kate Zambreno

Those of you who know my reading history will know that Kate Zambreno is one of my favorites. And now, having finished O Fallen Angel, I have read every book she has published, which makes me a little sad. I rarely read an author’s entire backlist, no matter how much I love them, so this is a testament to how much Zambreno means to me.

I have thought of Zambreno’s first two books, O Fallen Angel and Green Girl, as relatively traditional novels, but that’s not true of O Fallen Angel, and it makes me want to reread Green Girl to see if I’m remembering that book wrong. O Fallen Angel is savage! The story it tells could fit in a traditional novel — it’s about a midwestern American family with a rebellious daughter whose life is heading off the rails — but the tone and style are what stand out. Here’s how the main part of the book begins:

She is his Mrs. and he is her Mister the Mommy and Daddy the two of them forever and ever and ever they will never part they will never be apart except when Daddy has to go make the bread and she has to bake it.

This is a section labeled “Mommy” — one of three regularly recurring sections — and each “Mommy” section is the same, with frequent run-ons and lots of exclamation points:

And yes her own Daddy dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 50 but one must not think of such things! Yes Mommy is well-trained in the art of good housekeeping. She keeps the house, she stays inside the house because she’s only wearing pink slippers! Such dainty feet!

The satire is pitch-perfect: we learn about everything Mommy tries not to think about, while watching her work so hard to keep those things down. She lives in a world she tries to keep sterile and perfect: perfectly clean, perfectly Christian, perfectly well-behaved, perfectly white and middle-class and sexually repressed and heteronormative. All those exclamation points show the strain. Her voice is both funny and painful — she’s ridiculous and oh, so believable. I know people like Mommy. It’s just too good not to quote at length:

Mommy goes kind of deaf when the news is on and anything unpleasant occurs like wars or hungry children in Haiti or global warming, Mommy tsk-tsks and changes the channel or fixes herself a snack in the microwave. She watches her stories that she follows religiously or she watches the talk shows. She relaxes into the banalities of daytime television it is a calm sea she welcomes familiar faces she loves her talk shows she loves chatting and gabbing but she doesn’t like to actually talk about anything real. She loves Oprah even though Oprah is black she is a very articulate black woman yes a very gentle black woman yes there’s nothing racist about Mommy how could there be something racist about Mommy when she watches Oprah?

A major source of strain for Mommy is her twenty-something daughter Maggie, the second of the three main voices. Like Mommy’s her sections have simple phrasing and run-ons, and sometimes use exclamation points, but they are much darker and full of pain. Maggie has cut contact with her family and is miserable. She is trying to escape her childhood, her mother, and her upbringing, but she is haunted by them. She wants to be good, but she also wants to be bad; she feels totally alone, unable to reconcile her mess of emotions, unable to understand what is wrong with her. The last thing she wants is to be her mother, but what should she be instead? She starts off in a bad place, and then things get worse.

The third voice is Malachi, a street prophet who hears voices and writes down messages that come from the sky, or maybe from God. He has no connection to the other characters but serves as a counterpoint to Mommy’s perfect life. He’s the insanity that lies underneath the American dream of perfection. He’s the madman who speaks truth about the American consumerist, death-obsessed war machine.

I mentioned earlier that Mommy’s voice begins the main part of the novel, but before that there is a “chorus” that speaks, and reappears later in the novel as well. The first chorus section — the novel’s true opening — begins:

There is a corpse in the center of this story
There is a corpse and it is ignored
No one looks at the corpse
Everyone not-looks at the corpse

Mommy is straining to not-look at the corpse, Maggie acknowledges the corpse is there and it’s shattering her, and Malachi is yelling to the world that the corpse is there but no one listens.

As you can tell from this description, this is no realist novel with well-developed characters. Instead, it’s a furious, dark satire of the brittleness of American life, propped up as it is by our efforts to ignore every bad thing in our past and present. This effort makes even Mommy miserable: her life is so empty. She has lost her daughter — she has rejected her but also lost her — and her husband avoids her. She keeps the world safely outside her perfect house, leaving her with nothing, a nothing she’s So, So Happy About!

My edition of the novel (reissued by Harper Perennial in 2017 after its original publication by Chiasmus Press in 2010) has an interview with Zambreno in the back where she talks about Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as a source of inspiration:

I thought of myself as a portraitist I guess, but with language, exorcising both Bacon’s triptych as well as the portraits of Marlene Dumas, and trying in a way to paint not characters but nervous systems, flayed and flawed and committing desperate acts of self-immolation.

And, yes, these characters do feel like nervous systems — the book is raw, with surface-level fury running through everything, each and every word and sentence. What a novel to begin one’s career!

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Publishing This Week

New books out recently that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:

• Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis (Haymarket Books): “First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and commanding account of [Davis’s] early years in struggle.”

  

• Tides by Sara Freeman (Grove Press): This is a “portrait of a deeply unpredictable woman who walks out of her life and washes up in a seaside town.”

• Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove): This is an “account of Evaristo's life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world.”

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (Riverhead, 2020): This has been on my mind to read for a while, and then I listened to a discussion of this book on my new podcast obsession I’ll Find Myself When I’m Dead, and then I decided to get my own copy, finally.

  

• The Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop (New Directions, 2021): Podcasts must be responsible for a lot of book sales, or at least they are responsible for book sales to me: I bought this because of David Naimon’s interview with the author. It’s a poetry collection that “explores the felt nature of existence as well as gravity and velocity, the second hemisphere of time, mortality and aging, language and immigration, a Chinese primer, the artist Hannah Höch, and dwarf stars.”

Currently Reading

• Want by Lynn Steger Strong (Henry Holt, 2020): This is my current audiobook, and I’m obsessed. It’s a commonly-told story — a New York City woman unhappy with her life — but something about it is keeping me enthralled.

  

• I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead, 2021): I started this knowing it was about motherhood and expecting it to be like other recent motherhood books, so when it veered off into the protagonist’s father’s history (as a close friend of Charles Manson!), I got confused. But I’m further along and getting into it.

• Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, translated by Julia Sanches (Transit Books, 2021): “In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body.”

  

The Cormac Report

A typical long weekend in January at my house: Rick and I are shoveling very wet snow off the driveway — basically shoveling water, it’s so wet — with Cormac helping for awhile, until he gets bored and begins to play with the snow piles. He makes up a story about Mount Saint Snow that somehow involves a huge fire, a tornado, and maybe other natural disasters, and lots of people die. I’m not sure what else happens, but it’s a lot. He frequently gets in my way, but he also only needs occasional nods and one-word responses from me and otherwise is keeping himself happily occupied. It’s not a bad scene, even though my arms are aching — I have not been doing strength-training, alas — and will be sore tomorrow. I’m occupied, Cormac is occupied, we have a concrete task ahead of us, and he’s using his imagination and also running around with the dog. I’ll take it!

Have a good week everyone.